Peter Buckley, "Obi in New
York"
Buckley argues that Obi occupied a small and unexceptional part
of New York City's theatrical scene until its strange appropriation
by the first African-American theatrical troupe. The reworking of the
Obi material is not only placed in the context of the city's
race relations but also within the increasing transatlantic demand for
novelty entertainments.
[go to Buckley's essay]
Jeffrey N. Cox, "Theatrical Forms, Ideological
Conflicts, and the Staging of Obi"
John Fawcett's Obi; or, Three-Finger'd Jack in its various versions
offers one way to gauge the response of English audiences to slavery
and to those it oppressed. More particularly, Obi can reveal
how difficult it was to find an appropriate form for bodying forth upon
stage the horrors of slavery, as the genres and the institutional structure
of the British theater worked to control a potentially radical message.
The story of Jack Mansong, a slave in revolt, had the potential to bring
a radically anti-slavery message to the stage. While the play's initial
staging as a melodrama certainly did not embrace Mansong's revolt, various
features of the pantomime did serve to give Mansong and the Afro-Caribbean
culture he represented power on stage. Rewritten as a melodrama with
spoken dialogue, the play might seem to have lost some its radical potential,
but the great actor Ira Aldridge, through what Henry Louis Gates calls
"signifyin[g]," managed to create in Jack one of the key theatrical
images of a man of African descent.
[go to Cox's essay]
Jerrold E. Hogle, "Directing Obi
in 2000"
This essay both summarizes and explains two re-stagings with papers
of the play Obi; or Three-Fingered Jack (first staged in London
in 1800) as these were presented in the year 2000 in two different parts
of the United States. One one level, this piece compares the two productions
in detail, the one presented in Boston to a community audience and the
one presented for academics at the 2000 Conference of the North American
Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR). In this process, it tries
to account for the rationales of two different directors behind their
choices of scenes, perfomance styles, actors, singers, and stagings.
It also confronts the difficulties of staging a once-racist musical
play—one that changed over time from 1800 into the 1820s—for
widely different audiences in America at the most recent turn of the
century. It is hoped that this theatrical extension of the larger project
of recovering Obi reveals the complex tensions still attached
to racism and memories of slavery while it also reconstructs the conditions
of theater and imperialism in England at the beginning of the nineteenth
century.
[go to Hogle's essay]
Robert Hoskins, "Savage Boundaries:
Reading Samuel Arnold's Score"
Samuel Arnold's musical score for the original pantomime version of
Obi generates a tension between the pastoral world of the plantation
ostensibly dedicated to Christian morality and the exotic world of slave
insurrection associated with Obeah. It emerges to map the ambiguous
and hybrid status inherent in cross-cultural encounters during the pre-emancipation
era. If Arnold associates Obeah with the wilderness outside the plantation
eden, then there are moments which suggest a different kind of discourse.
Some music for slaves creates enough space to absorb the idea of grief
and in the famous cave scene, Rosa sings the pantomime's "hit" song
as an expression of transracial desire. Arnold's borrowings from his
Viennese contemporaries Haydn and Mozart is of special interst; the
famous movement from Haydn's "Surprise" symphony, for example, is used
to accompany a night raid. In the case of Mozart's K575, the music had
probably not been previously heard in London.
[go to Hoskins's essay]
Debbie Lee, "Grave Dirt, Dried Toads,
and the Blood of a Black Cat: How Aldridge Worked His Charms"
The paper explores the complex ways in which Ira Aldridge, in the role
of Jack, brought together the rich cultural symbols of slaves, tigers,
sugar and blood. It begins by tracing the play to its source in Benjamin
Moseley's Treatise on Sugar. Against Mosely's treatise, where
sugar is seen as a cure to the diseases of Western culture, the paper
uncovers the debates on slavery where the slave trade, not sugar, is
called a disease. Further, by examining the rituals of "obi," especially
death and reanimation, the paper investigates how obi actually mocks
the experience of slavery. Since the centerpiece of the practice was
the charm, or obi bag, the paper pays particular attention to the bag's
contents, which had the ability to evoke both the brokenness and the
power of the rebel slave experience. The paper claims that Aldridge,
by acting in the play, performed the rituals of obi-death and reanimation,
brokenness and power, and made obi a cure to the disease of slavery.
[go to Lee's essay]
Charles Rzepka, "Introduction"
The pantomime and melodrama versions of Obi, or Three-finger'd Jack
played an important role in abolition debates and in the career of Ira
Aldridge, the first African-American actor of international stature.
This Praxis volume includes essays by preeminent scholars of
English Romanticism, theater, and music history on the evolution, performance
history, and social and cultural impact of the Obi plays, as
well as illustrations and modern video reproductions of scenes from
both the pantomime and melodrama versions. This volume also contains
the complete text of the melodrama version of Obi.
[go to "Introduction"]
